E3 2011: Shooting Friends in the Face with Star Fox

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Multiplayer's more fun when you can see your foes' fear.

By Lucas M. Thomas

It's always embarrassing to lose a match in any multiplayer game, but Star Fox 64 3D adds extra visual insult to your ego's injuries -- it captures, right at the moment of your defeat, a photograph of your downtrodden, despairing face. Then it displays it, right alongside the smile of the winner, to solidify your sense of shame.

Star Fox 64 3D is giving a graphical facelift to the game's classic single-player campaign, and its addition of an optional gyroscopic control mode is certainly intriguing. But here at E3, multiplayer was king. Because it was just so satisfying to step up to the demo unit, settle in for a dogfight and shoot show-going strangers in the face.

The inner camera of the 3DS captures a constant video stream of each combatant while you're climbing, diving and barrel-rolling through the sky in Star Fox 64 3D's revamped multiplayer matches, and the image of your face is projected in a hovering square above your Arwing through the duration of each match.

It's a useful addition from a practical standpoint, as you can more easily identify potential targets from a distance -- picking out just who you want to swoop in on and attack with blazing lasers. But it's also a fun little extra for purely frivolous reasons, because it's very entertaining to see looks of worry emerge on your adversaries when you've got them in a target lock, or their delighted laughter when they turn the tables on you and shoot you out of the sky instead.

The only thing that could have made the E3 experience more fun would have been if I actually had my own friends from home here to play alongside me, filling up those hovering squares with familiar faces to shoot.

Some Star Fox fans have lamented the lack of Wi-Fi Connection support for this multiplayer mode, as they were looking forward to going online with their 3DS to take down distant strangers with their mad piloting skills. But I think this face integration will ultimately make the local-only multiplayer more than fun enough to make up for that lack of an online option -- because if taking down random other E3 attendees got me this excited, it'll be an absolute joy to destroy my own brother back home.